the courts have been pretty clear in this area so far, siding with some variation on "progress" over the ownership argument. It definitely feels like a "too big to fail" scenario at this stage.
>> The judge ruled last month, in essence, that Anthropic's use of pirated books had violated copyright law
This is not what certification of a class action lawsuit means. It's procedural, not substantive and doesn't weigh in on the merits of the lawsuit. It's about the mechanics of bringing about action representing a potentially huge group of class representatives. The article then goes on to speculate about how Anthropic will post bond for the billions that have been awarded while trying to fundraise, so the clickbait title is backed up with "what if" fan fiction and there's nothing substantive here.
The article responds to its own headline with “...but not really”:
> While the risk of a billion-dollar-plus jury verdict is real, it’s important to note that judges routinely slash massive statutory damages awards — sometimes by orders of magnitude. Federal judges, in particular, tend to be skeptical of letting jury awards reach levels that would bankrupt a major company.
Why is it fair use (hashed out in court already) for google to copy every book they can get a hold of and store the full pages and use them to create their n-grams data and presumably to train their ai, but not for this company?
If they had bought each book themselves would it be fair use? So this is only about the piracy?
"As a matter of practice (and sometimes doctrine), judges rarely issue rulings that would outright force a company out of business.... So while the jury’s damages calculation will be the headline risk, it probably won’t be the last word."
That should've been the first sentence in this article. Nothing to see here, folks. Just another baity headline.
>But Alsup split a very fine hair. In the same ruling, he found that Anthropic’s wholesale downloading and storage of millions of pirated books — via infamous “pirate libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi — was not covered by fair use at all. In other words: training on lawfully acquired books is one thing, but stockpiling a central library of stolen copies is classic copyright infringement.
I am not actively following this trend but didn't Meta do the exact same and successfully argued that it was fair use because.. they didn't seed or upload any data?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] thread>> The judge ruled last month, in essence, that Anthropic's use of pirated books had violated copyright law
This is not what certification of a class action lawsuit means. It's procedural, not substantive and doesn't weigh in on the merits of the lawsuit. It's about the mechanics of bringing about action representing a potentially huge group of class representatives. The article then goes on to speculate about how Anthropic will post bond for the billions that have been awarded while trying to fundraise, so the clickbait title is backed up with "what if" fan fiction and there's nothing substantive here.
> While the risk of a billion-dollar-plus jury verdict is real, it’s important to note that judges routinely slash massive statutory damages awards — sometimes by orders of magnitude. Federal judges, in particular, tend to be skeptical of letting jury awards reach levels that would bankrupt a major company.
If they had bought each book themselves would it be fair use? So this is only about the piracy?
That should've been the first sentence in this article. Nothing to see here, folks. Just another baity headline.
That's what I thought. Members of the class should be disqualified from joining based on this criteria alone
What am I missing here?